In tax accounting there is a concept called the “Robin Hood effect”, which describes both the tax bracket setup that requires income above certain levels be taxed at higher rates and also the reduction of deductible items once a taxpayer exceeds a certain adjusted gross income threshold.
None of you care about that, I’m sure, but aside from watching Robin Hood: Men in Tights about a dozen times in the span of a week when I was in middle school, it’s the only thing that came to mind when I saw the following news from Deadline, announcing a new version of the Robin Hood tale has landed at Leonardo DiCaprio‘s production house Appian Way, this one a “gritty version of the rogue do-gooder” entitled Robin Hood: Origins, because what the hell else would it be?
Joby Harold, who wrote the Knights of the Roundtable: King Arthur script for director Guy Ritchie, wrote the screenplay for the Robin Hood: Origins, which ultimately will take on two other adaptations of the classic story coming down the pipe at other studios. One is a revisionist tale set up at Disney called Nottingham & Hood, and the other is a pitch over at Sony about which very little is known but I think most of us could probably guess what the studio is going for: a little dark, a little gritty, a nice PG-13 rating and the ability to turn it into some type of franchise, because we don’t have enough of those already. I could be wrong, but who knows.
The Robin Hood project at Disney is said to have “a Pirates of the Caribbean tone” and the studio hopes “to launch a new adventure franchise that fits [its] global brand.” Sounds par for the course for Disney, but here’s hoping this third project from Joby Harold is at Appian Way because the studio wants to give it the type of treatment it gave films like The Aviator, Public Enemies, Shutter Island, and The Wolf of Wall Street, though I’m not exactly hopeful just yet.
